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EITHNE
NÍ BRAONÁINknown as Enya
- was born in 1961, 17 May, and spent her childhood in Gweedore (in
County Donegal, situated in the north-west of Ireland, one of the main
redoubts of the Irish language). There are nine brothers and sisters.
Apart from Enya, who is in the middle, there are four other girls and
four boys. All the family have won many competitions and are famous in
national traditional music circles. Whilst at school, Enya studied
the piano and classical music. Three of her brothers and sisters,
Máire Ní Bhraonáin (Mary Brennan), Ciarán
Ó Braonáin (Kieran Brennan) and Pól Ó
Braonáin (Paul Brennan) formed, together with their uncles
Pádraig Ó Dugáin (Patrick Duggan) and Noel
Ó Dugáin (Noel Duggan), a folk music group (at first with
a certain American feel and then more purely Irish, though influenced
by jazz and by others such as Pentangle). The group was named Clannad,
a contraction of "the family from Gweedore" in Irish. In 1980, at the
suggestion of their manager, Fachtna O'Kelly, Enya became a member of
the group, participating in the recording of two of their albums, Crann
Ull and Fuaim. Apart from providing vocals, she played the Wurlitzer
electric piano and later the Prophet 5 synthesizer. She performed with
Clannad on many occasions, until, in February 1982, on completing a
European tour, she left the group, no one really knowing why. Perhaps
she was fed up with being treated as just the little sister. Since
then she has lived in Artane, in the north of Dublin, sharing a house
together with Nicky Ryan and Roma, his wife, who comes from Belfast.
All had been involved with Clannad at some time. Nick Ryan had worked
as a sound engineer with Planxty and later with Clannad, at the time
the group was starting out. In 1980, their manager, Fachtna O'Kelly,
took charge of the new group The Boomtown Rats, for which reason Nicky
thenceforth took charge of their [Clannad's] work. In his house he
installed a recording studio, Aigle. There he has recorded, for
example, Christy Moore's album Ordinary Man, which has three songs in
which Enya takes part in the chorus.

It was also Fachtna O'Kelly who suggested to Enya after she left
Clannad, that she devote herself to composing for films. And so, in
1984, she approached her first important task. Roma Ryan had sent a
cassette of Enya to film producer David Puttnam, who already had to his
credit such titles as Midnight Express, Chariots Of Fire and Los Gritos
Del Silencio. Puttnam asked her to compose dreamy and romantic music
with a sixties feel for the feature film The Frog Prince. Having a
studio at her disposal, Enya worked almost always at home with the
Roland Juno 60 synthesizer or the Kurzweil sampler, and then added
piano and voice. Nicky Ryan recorded everything and helped to put the
compositions into their final form. The next commission was for the
BBC. It was to prepare music for an important television documentary
series on the history of the Celtic civilisation throughout its 2700
years. The series was called The Celts. The composition took ten months
work. The music was liked so much that the BBC decided to release a
selection as an independent record, before the series was broadcast and
entitled simply Enya, with barely a mention in the liner notes that it
was a soundtrack. She played nearly all the instruments on the album,
sometimes doubling up as many as eighty voices to create her
characteristic sound, of dense textures, and ethereal voices, dreamlike
and enchanting. It was to paint by means of synthesizers a modern sonic
landscape that could evoke different atmospheres, from the mournful
lament of 'Deireadh An Tuath' to the striking 'Boadicea', with its
astounding dynamic of overdubbed voices. Nicky Ryan acted as producer
and co-author of the arrangements and his wife Roma wrote nearly all
the lyrics, for the most part nearly inaudible or impenetrable, giving
an evanescent character to the music by being sung in Latin, Welsh or
Scottish Gaelic.

Only on three of the pieces did other musicians take part, one on
each. Patrick Halling, a classical violinist who frequently plays in
recording sessions for rock artists (Jethro Tull and Steve Howe, for
example), added delicate nuances to the final track. The great piper
Liam Óg O'Floinn (or Liam O'Flynn, founder member of Planxty and
regular collaborator of composer Shaun Davey) played the melody part of
'The Sun In The Stream'. Lastly, the guitarist Arty McGlynn (ex-member
of Van Morrison's band and of Planxty and current member of Patrick
Street) correspondingly completed with his elegant flourishes the only
song whose lyric was comprehensible to us, being in English and sung
clearly, 'I Want Tomorrow'. It was, moreover, the song chosen as a
single and video (curiously, in the video the guitar is not heard.)
This record subsequently climbed to number one in the Irish charts,
which started the commercial rise of Enya. She collaborated with the
singer Sinéad O'Connor reciting a short text on 'Never Get Old'
from her album The Lion And The Cobra.

She signed with an important multinational (WEA), and had a resounding
success with her second album Watermark, which has passed 10 million
sales worldwide, and has gone platinum in 14 different countries,
helped by the single 'Orinoco Flow', a No 1 hit in Britain. Then she
repeated her world success with Shepherd Moons, which spent an amazing
199 weeks on the Billboard charts in the USA and has sold over 11
million copies. A new version of the album Enya was released as The
Celts and in 1995 with The Memory of Trees was yet another smash hit
album. Enya has been nominated for four Grammy Awards and has won two,
both for "Best New Age Album", Shepherd Moons in 1992 and The Memory of
Trees in 1997. Also in 1997 she released a compilation album titled
Paint The Sky With Stars that contained a selection of the Enya better
known themes and two new songs: 'Paint The Sky With Stars' and 'Only
If...' That year itself came out A Box Of Dreams; a box set that
contained a three CD collection and an illustrated booklet. The CDs
were entitled Oceans, Clouds and Stars, and they cover the Enya career
since her debut in 1987.

The artist spent the remainder of the decade contributing soundtrack
material to various projects, before returning to the studio to record
A Day Without Rain, her first new studio album in five years. Of this
album she says, "The title refers to the mood on a particularly
peaceful day on which there was no rain. We do get a lot of rain in
Ireland in all seasons. We had a run of days where it had done nothing
but rain. Then one day the sun came out. It was then that I wrote the
title track, so what else could I call it?". The album shot up the US
and several European charts almost a year after its release, thanks to
the use of the track "Only Time" in news coverage of the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Her music has appeared
in many more smash hit films, including "L.A. Story", "Green Card",
"Toys", the TomCruise/Nicole Kidman film "Far and Away" and Martin
Scorcese's "Age Of Innocence". Enya's new song 'Only Time' features in
the film, "Sweet November", starring Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves.
In 2001 she records 2 brand new songs for Lord of the Rings - The
Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack, "Aniron (theme for Aragorn and
Arwen)" and "May It Be".

She has made appearances at benefits and has played for the Pope,
the King of Sweden and the Queen of England, but these involved
playbacks of her work while she played and possibly sang along, not a
true live performance. "It’d be a really great thing to
do,” Enya says of performing live. “We’ve first been
talking about next year, trying to at least do a TV special
performance, having the setting, say, in a cathedral or something and
involve quite a few people - orchestrating the music, having choir.
It’d be fantastic to try. You can’t emulate the same sound,
but definitely the music can cross over to a rendering for a live
performance. We’re both very confident about that.” In 2002
Enya got a Golden Globe and Oscar nomination for "best original song"
with "May It Be". Wins a new Grammy Award for "Best New Age Album" with
A Day without Rain. Wins three World Music Awards: "best-selling Female
artist", "best-selling New Age artist" and "best-selling Irish artist",
and wins the award for "best pop-rock single" with "Only Time" in the
Echo Awards (Germany)...

Although fronted by Enya, the music released under her name is the
result of collaboration between three people: Enya, who sings, writes
and performs all the music, her producer, sound engineer and
co-arranger Nicky Ryan and his wife, lyricist Roma Ryan. Enya has
previously stated that without any one of them, "Enya" would not exist.